Designers can empower people to make confident decisions. Empowerment goes beyond just basic functionality: we help people meet their needs and gain a sense of fulfillment and knowledge through their interactions with screens, products, and services. Empowerment is the sense of confidence people gain by making decisions and feeling good about the decisions they make. Our users take that feeling into other interactions as well. Empowerment is at the core of trust, too. Today, cynicism undermin...| Boxes and Arrows
Updated January 30, 2023 – Amy Jiménez Márquez After much internal debate, I’m placing the publication on indefinite hiatus. It’s a difficult decision, and if you have questions or want to talk about the future of Boxes and Arrows please contact me. Boxes and Arrows will continue as an archive freely available to readers. Thank you so much for your readership over the years. This isn’t the end of Boxes and Arrows. It’s simply a new chapter that is yet| Boxes and Arrows
You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or, maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. You gave more than you got and it didn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore? Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket. Or your doctor. Or your boss. Do| Boxes and Arrows
What is ontology? An ontology is a formal system for modeling concepts and their relationships. Unlike relational database systems, which are essentially interconnected tables, ontologies put a premium on the relationships between concepts by storing the information in a graph database, or triplestore. (The following examples use data derived from PLOS, which makes all of its Open Access data and content available.) Relational databases are good at representing tabular data for one-to-one rel...| Boxes and Arrows
This past year we became acutely aware of how interconnected we all are. The toilet paper shortage gave the world a glimpse at supply chains, and the pandemic as a whole was a crash course in how our healthcare system can handle crises. It can be difficult to envision how we can make a difference even if we know the systems we live in don’t function well for everyone. But what does this have to do with design? Designers make| Boxes and Arrows
Using the customer intentions method to humanize our virtual worlds In the 2010 Sci-Fi film Inception a professional thief is offered a chance at erasing his criminal history if he implants one person’s ideas into the subconscious of another person. He aims to do this by crashing the second person’s dreams. He hires a graduate architecture student to design the dreamscapes. To design each space of the dream, she must align with the thief/dream crasher’s need to easily and intuitively| Boxes and Arrows
As the workforce decentralizes through the increased availability of remote employment options, teams have to learn to compensate for the lack of in-person collaboration to tackle the daily work challenges. Currently, I am the Senior UX Designer for my division and am based in the United States along with our Program Managers, Leadership and Stakeholders, reporting to my Product team based in Europe, and handing over designs to the Development, based in India. However, just because the team i...| Boxes and Arrows
Technology products are embedded in every aspect of daily life from homes, cars, phones, schools, workplaces. They’re in entertainment, healthcare, safety, and beyond. While technology is often billed as making things easier, faster, cheaper, and fairer, it can cause harm at scale. People face frustration, harassment, financial loss, physical harm, and more. What are “Flawed products?” Flawed products are products, services, and technologies developed without considering, includin...| Boxes and Arrows
Enterprises often have a simplistic understanding of navigational structures in UX Design. Companies shy away from messing with known organizational schemas for fear that their users or customers will become confused and run away. We don’t give our users enough credit. As a result, most software navigational structures either reflect hierarchical departmental company/brand organization (because how can users be confused by that?), or a very top-heavy list of bucketed themes loosely based on...| Boxes and Arrows
Imagine walking into a packed conference room (or jumping on a zoom call) for a meeting on a pressing topic. As you find your seat, you start to feel like the temperature is rising and your heartbeat quickens, your mind races through the questions that could be thrown your way. The meeting starts and things begin on a good note. The discussion is moving forward and then it happens: someone directs a question at you. It feels like a game| Boxes and Arrows
